What the leaders do - and where Betclic hasn't caught up yet

Mentions in newspapers count toward the GEO score - whether paid advertising or reporting, the bot doesn't distinguish.

In practice, these pages are paid content with their own promo code (e.g. "JOGOVIP", "BETANOBS") - not independent editorial press. For an AI system indexing brand mentions that doesn't matter: sponsored and organic count the same. That's why this dimension doesn't differentiate anyone.

Having owned content counts toward the GEO score - but only if it's in real text, not hidden behind code that only the browser can render.

What matters here is the format: only what's in readable HTML without JavaScript counts - we confirmed this by testing Betclic's FAQ (empty code) and Betano's blog (only visible via Google's index, not in a direct fetch). Placard: the only source is an institutional page published by Santa Casa (parent entity), not a blog run by Placard itself.

Concrete specificity carries more weight in the GEO score than generic praise - whether a named tester or a product feature identified by name.

What matters here is the format of the review, not the brand that publishes it - identified author, visible methodology, concrete data (dates, values, times). That's replicable across the 22 domains regardless of what Betclic or any operator does.

Sponsorships count toward the GEO score indirectly - they generate news, and it's that news that counts.

A sponsorship itself isn't text an AI reads - a logo on a shirt isn't indexable data. What counts is the text the sponsorship generates around it: news, articles, mentions in captions.

Comparators and affiliate sites are often the source AI uses to answer "which is the best betting site" - the more of these sites talk about a brand, the higher the probability it appears cited.

What counts here is the count of distinct domains, not the volume of backlinks - the Ahrefs study shows brand mentions across many sites correlate 3x more strongly with AI visibility than having many links pointing to the same place.

Up-to-date content counts toward the GEO score - AI prefers recent information to old information.

Betano: post confirmed on 25 Aug 2026, but with a technical caveat - a direct fetch only sees 2023 metadata, not the real text. Google indexed the content, which suggests systems that rely on indexes can read it; systems that crawl on their own without executing JavaScript risk seeing nothing.

Own blog: Betclic and LeBull confirmed without, by direct test/search. Placard's active sponsorship = ✗ because there's no current sports sponsorship (only Santa Casa's institutional weight, counted separately).

This is measured data, not an estimate - a tracker running the Portuguese betting prompt set through AI models and recording every brand mentioned and every URL cited. Overall visibility share is the percentage of answers in which each brand appears. Betclic sits at 8.3%, well behind the leaders.

Brand visibility · overall AI share

Higher = more present in AI answers. Betclic (highlighted in red) trails the two market leaders by a wide margin and sits level with a tourism body, below the regulator itself.

Visibility by topic · Betclic vs core-set average

Betclic edges the average only on "Bónus e freebets" and "Casinos online Portugal" - the exact verticals the owned network targets - and lags on the higher-intent "Casas de apostas online" query.

What the models cite as sources · 278 URLs analysed

Example cited domains

Source: AI Tracker · betclic.pt · snapshot 2026-09-01 (278 source URLs).

1. 1Betano18/18
2. 2Bwin16/18
3. 3Solverde12/18
4. 3Betclicsubject12/18
5. 5LeBull9/18
6. 6Placard8/18

Each axis: 0-3 · center = 0, outer ring = 3

Radar highlights Betano (top reference), Bwin (second) and Betclic - Betclic's smaller area comes from the two gaps: Content and Freshness.